I went out into the newsroom, dropped the copy into a wire basket on Mayflower van’s desk. He looked up, squinted down his punched-out nose, bit through the plastic end of his Tiparillo. He said, “Shit,” but he was looking at my copy. “Choking to death on a plastic-tip thing,” he said, scowling. “A fitting end, God knows.” I went away.
Later I stood by Lake of the Isles in the sunshine staring at the green mounds rising sweetly in the water, enough to stir the poet’s pen. It was a beautiful day and I sat for a while on a bench. When I got up to leave, it occurred to me that I’d made love to a woman on that bench one summer night several years before. I looked hard at the bench but it looked like all the other benches. Mosquitoes had tended our pleasures that night.
I walked back across the grass, across the street toward the Kenwood tennis courts, where I’d left the car. A kid with a bike was looking at the car. “Is that yours?” he said. I admitted it. “Boy, it’s really a mess.” He rode away.
I got in behind the wheel. Tight fit, got to lose a quick twenty. I was nervous.
Why the hell did Larry Blankenship kill himself?
Events were conspiring against me, like Caesar’s pals.
I yanked the Porsche into the fire lane by the lobby entrance and there was Mark Bernstein looking like something from a British sex scandal: His image makers were getting him used to dark pinstripes with suppressed waists, paisley foulard ties, and off-white shirts with spread collars. There was still something of the squad room about him but he was beginning to catch on. He didn’t look comfortable yet but he wore his new getup with a confidence which suited a mayoral candidate.
“You can’t park there,” he said.
“I know, it’s a blight on the building. Should be one of your typical Mark IV’s.”
“You miss the point. It’s a fire lane.”
“I don’t think I’m going to vote for you, Mark. You’re ahead of your time. Fascism is still out.”
We walked into the lobby. I followed him into Bill Oliver’s office. Then the three of us took the elevator to the fourteenth floor. Bernstein told me I shouldn’t be there but then he dropped it; we’d known each other too long. Maybe I would vote for him in the end.
Oliver unlocked the door and we went inside.
Blankenship hadn’t gone in much for decorating. The place looked as if he’d been passing through, like the inside of a cardboard box. There was a new pasteboard card table that sagged in the middle, a plain wooden chair, a rather large cactus which struck me as balding and obscene. That was the dining room. There was a leather club chair with a rip in the seat cushion, a telephone on the floor beside it, a desk, a stack of unopened newspapers, a poster from the Guthrie taped to the white wall, a small black-and-white Sony, some copies of the New Yorker, a well-thumbed Playboy, a pack of Old Golds, one of those awful yellow beanbag chairs, a large candlestick with a bayberry’s remains hunkering about an inch above the rim, a puddle of wax on the floor around its base. That was the living room. It looked as if a man had been slowly dying in it, a minute at a time.
Bernstein looked at it for a surprisingly long time, considering the sparse furnishings. He took a Vicks inhaler out of his pocket and sniffed it. “No punch left,” he said. “I always forget to get a new one. Just like ball-point pens.” He turned and went into the kitchen. “Mine never write. Never.”
Toaster with crumbs all over the top, an expensive frying pan with a crust of egg fried against the sides, a loaf of bread which appeared to have turned to stone after giving birth to enough penicillin to stop an epidemic of clap, a mug with a cream culture growing on top of a coffee slick. Plastic dishes in the cupboard. “Jeez, Bill. Smells bad,” Bernstein said.
“Probably food in the disposal,” Oliver said. “Put his garbage in and forgot to run it.”
The bedroom had been done by the same fine hand. An unmade bed, a chest of drawers, a bottle of Old Mr. Boston brandy with an orange-juice glass beside it, a stack of books on another cheap, unpainted desk, a pocket-size transistor radio, two suits in the closet, several striped shirts, a couple of ties draped over the doorknob, a pair of black shoes with plastic trees squeezed into them. The bathroom: a can of Gillette Foamy, a straight razor, a bottle of Aqua Velva. Bernstein was staring into the bathtub.
“Scuff marks,” he said.
“What?” Oliver looked up.
“The man was in the bathtub with his shoes on,” Bernstein said. “That’s all.”
Oliver looked at me. I shrugged. Bernstein was detecting.
I said, “If I’d lived here, I’d have killed myself, too.”
Bernstein pursed his lips, unbuttoned his suit coat, and put his hands on his hips. He looked at the scuff marks awhile longer and walked back into the living room. “Me, too,” he said. He looked at the desk, picked up a piece of scratch paper from beside the telephone near the club chair. He brushed off some gray stuff which lay in lumps here and there on the floor; some kind of dust or fluff.
“Somebody has been here,” he said to the piece of paper. “Somebody has cleaned this place out. The drawers of the desk, both desks, are open and empty. Nobody has just nothing. Not like this. Everybody has something. Letters, bills, address book, just some damn thing.” He bent down and picked up a gob of the gray stuff, peered at it, and put it carefully on the card table.
“Why are we here?” I said. “It’s not murder. It’s suicide, a guy killing himself. So why are you looking for clues?”
Bernstein opened the sliding doors onto the balcony. The sun was bright and cheery, the trees green, the air clean.
“Why?” I said.
He lit a cigarette, cupping his hands as Peter Gunn would have done, and exhaled. “Do you know a Mrs. Timothy Dierker?”
Bill Oliver laughed, shook his head. The rooms had made him pale, the feel of death. But he couldn’t help laughing.
“Yes,” I said.
“She asked me if I’d look around. So I am looking around. She tells quite a story.”
“Yes, she does,” I said. “To me. To Bill. To you. Very persistent lady.”
“She said there was something funny about Blankenship’s death. She was certainly upset … Since I had to get hold of his wife, or ex-wife, anyway, I thought I’d just come and take a look. We’ve got a will he’d made out a couple of weeks ago, left with his attorney, and he leaves everything to his ex-wife …”
“Lucky lady,” I said.
“Well, he didn’t have much.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“By phone. I told her what happened.”
“What did she say?” I was having a funny little biological reaction, a nervous flutter behind my ribs which I couldn’t explain.
“She said she was sorry. She said she wasn’t surprised. He’d been depressed lately.”
“Was she calm?”
“Very.” He looked at his watch. There was an American flag on its face and it didn’t go with the suit. “Let’s go downstairs. She said she’d meet me here at eleven.” In the elevator he said, “She said she wanted to make an inventory of what was in the apartment. She’ll have to sign for the stuff.”
Kim Blankenship had not arrived by eleven forty-five and Bernstein stood up. “I’ve got to speak at a VFW luncheon.” He turned to me. “Not a word, Cavanaugh, not one word.” I walked outside with him. It was hot and dry with the kind of wind that can make you sick to your stomach.
“You’ve been stiffed, Mark,” I said.
“Well, it happens. Funeral preparations maybe.” He walked to his car and I strolled along with him.
“This strong silent number,” I said. “Are you sure it’s the real you? I’d have thought something a bit warmer, chummier—”
“I wish I hadn’t come,” he said, ignoring me.
“Why’s that?”
“Because then I wouldn’t know that somebody had been emptying out Blankenship’s apartment …”
“Is that a crime?”
“Y
es, Paul. It’s called theft. Often involves unlawful entry.”
“Nobody forced that door.”
“All right. So somebody has a key.”
“Or the door was unlocked.”
“But why? What did they take? I just wish I hadn’t come.” He looked into the sky, looked at his watch, and got into the car. “Paul, would you get your car out of the goddamn fire lane?”
My father, Archie Cavanaugh, is seventy-one years old and he never gets bored, never casts a backward, wistful glance at the past. His mind simply doesn’t work that way, and while I envy him, being with him is still a tonic. Maybe, I wonder, when I’m seventy-one I’ll be like him—wishful thinking if ever I indulged in it. The past clings to me like a starving, hollow-eyed waif, and I’m used to it by now.
I headed west on the Highway 12 tangle between the Guthrie and Loring Park and the Basilica, out past the nasty gore of the auto dealers and franchise fish shops and Shakey’s Pizza and the General Mills complex where Betty Crocker keeps on keepin’ on year after year, cake after cake, past a restaurant built at considerable expense to look like a mine shaft where I once survived the most wretched lunch of all time, past Ridgedale, where Dayton’s has established its latest beachhead in the battle for my dollar, on toward Wayzata, where the Republicans pretend that Minnesota is not a bastion of the Democratic machine and Robert Taft and Harold Stassen slumber like Siegfried waiting for the call.
Archie lives on a knoll which provides a sweep of green down to the shores of Lake Minnetonka on one side and a rolling meadow on another, the white frame house snuggled in among maples and oaks with an air of quiet calm, the kind of place where Ozzie and Harriet could live happily ever after with little David and little Ricky, and Ozzie would never have to go to work. There’s a frog pond with lily pads in back and a large flower garden. Inside, Archie has some good paintings, an army of panic buttons in case of burglars or worse, a leather pig to rest his feet before the library fireplace. He’s got all the things he’s ever wanted; he’s got it about as good as things can be at seventy-one.
I plopped the car into a puddle of shade and went in the front door. It was a hot day but cool in the house, not the cool of whirring machines but the work of country shade and breezes. Archie was working in the library with the French doors open wide onto a flagstone patio. He was writing furiously on a legal pad—looked up and winked—and I stood gazing but across the emerald lawn with the sprinkler laying down plush wet arcs. Archie hadn’t always had money and what he’d wound up with he’d made himself. During the thirties he’d worked at the Star-Journal in Minneapolis and taught at the University of Minnesota, where he’d met my mother when they were undergraduates. Shortly before the outbreak of war in Europe he’d gone to Illinois and then on to Washington to do intelligence work during our part of the war. While he was spending some time in London, my mother fell in love with a naval officer at the Great Lakes training station near Chicago and went off with him, taking me, of course. Archie had not been unduly distressed since he’d become fascinated with his new line of work; he amiably kept in touch with us throughout the war years and from 1946 on I spent summers with him in Chicago, where he’d gone back to being a journalism professor and I went to Cub games.
In 1950 he published a textbook in reporting which made him independent and very well off, indeed. It is frequently said that reporting today, for better or worse, owes its nature to my father, who of late had been insisting that he really got people headed toward the New Journalism decades ago but forgot to give it a name. Which may be true; I certainly don’t know. He came back to the University of Minnesota in the fifties and quit the academic world in 1960, when he was fifty-seven, because he wanted to write mystery novels, which he’d been doing ever since—with a newspaper reporter as his continuing hero, which with television and film and paperback rights made him a millionaire more than once. He was working on a critical volume surveying and analyzing the genre since the debut of Raymond Chandler; that’s how he was spending the summer. He was doing a chapter on the Englishman Michael Gilbert that day, the lawyer who writes them on the commuter train. Copies of Smallbone Deceased, Close Quarters, and Overdrive made an orderly stack on his desk. Galleys of a brand new one, Flash Point, were less tidy.
He finished his thought, capped his old art deco fountain pen, and leaned back, smiling beneath his white mustache.
“Gilbert knows very well what he is about,” he said, “an exceedingly orderly mind.” I nodded. He wanted me to stay to lunch and we went out and sat by a wrought-iron table near the frog pond. A haze rested lightly across the fields and I could hear the hum of insect life all around. White sails danced like knife blades on the flat, blinding bright lake.
Julia, my father’s secretary and dear friend, brought us salads and a bottle of cold Blue Nun and sat down to join us, cool and calm in a blue denim shirtwaist. Everything was so quiet and gentle and my father talked about Michael Gilbert and Julian Symons for a while as we ate. There were large white-and-orange shrimps in garlic and oil among the lettuce. Julia said she was sorry, but she preferred Dorothy Sayers, and my father said it was because Ian Carmichael was doing so well as Wimsey on the tube. He added that there was no need for an apology, she shouldn’t try to hide her intellectual pretensions, and we all chuckled rather dottily. Matey, we were all matey.
Finally I got down to cases: “What do you know about Tim Dierker?”
“Why, Tim’s all right, isn’t he?” My father’s blue eyes flickered up.
“Well, nothing has happened to him,” I said, “but it’s hard to say he’s all right.”
He picked his tooth with a pick, made a face. “Hmmm, I’ve stabbed myself. Ah, well … Tim Dierker. I met him forty or so years ago, known him ever since. Your mother’s family, as you know, had a good deal more money than was good for them, and I was sort of drawn into things like the Norway Creek Club because of it. That’s where I met Tim and Harriet.
“Tim didn’t have any phoniness about him; he was what we used to call a regular guy, which meant he took a dim view of bullshit, which you found a lot of at Norway Creek in those days. There were several of us out there in the long ago—we sort of hung around together.”
“Was this the beginning of your hunting and fishing club? I’ve seen pictures of you up north with Hub Anthony. Was he in this group?”
“Sure. We liked the chance of getting away from town—”
“And your wives, I’ll bet,” Julia said. She was ironic and wore very well. She and my father had met during the war and had taken up together fifteen years ago. She was his secretary, but she was a good deal more. Some of the time she stayed at the house, but she’d always maintained an apartment in town. She’d had a couple of husbands and that had cured her; she didn’t want a third.
“Of course. My wife in particular, I assure you.” He looked shyly at me, aware he’d insulted my mother, and I nodded. “What is behind this curiosity, if I may ask?”
I told them about the suicide of Larry Blankenship and the conversations with both Dierkers which ensued. My father is not the sort of man to become needlessly shaken by events occurring so far into the shadows, so far from his own concern. He nodded when I finished.
“Harriet is obviously as irretrievably nosy as ever and Tim is as irritated by bullshit. I’ve often thought of putting them into a book, what an absurdly mismatched pair—no wonder they never produced a child, it’d be like mating a Saint Bernard and a shrike …” He sipped at the goblet of Blue Nun Julia had freshened and took a cheroot from his shirt pocket. Julia handed him a box of matches from the cart beside the table. Wind rustled gently in the trees.
“I never knew Blankenship. I have met him, the name is familiar, probably because of his relationship with Kim Roderick, whom I did know somewhat.” He played with his cigar for a time and finally got it lit to his satisfaction. Julia slid an ashtray across the table toward him. A frog leaped onto a lily pad, the movement graceful, and sat squattin
g, staring at us. “It’s peculiar, she was the sort of person who gets talked about by others, even those who may not know her. I’ve met women like that from time to time in my life, not very often, when I think about it, but Kim was one of them. Star quality, maybe? Who knows. Maybe it’s genetic, just something in the blood.”
“Did everybody feel that way about her? Did they notice her?”
“I don’t know, but perhaps they did. It seemed that they kept talking about her … You should ask your former wife, my boy. Anne knew her when they were girls—Anne was being terribly democratic, as you know she sometimes is, and befriended this disconnected girl—”
“Disconnected?” Julia said. “What does that mean, for heaven’s sake?”
“Why, no connections, no family …”
“You mean she just appeared? The existential being?” Julia’s eyebrows arched.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, that’s exactly what she did, as I understand the story. Just appeared one day, applying for a job. But then, I’m only recalling what I’ve heard … But it’s a cinch she wasn’t one of the usual girls, wherever the hell she came from.”
“That’s about what Judge Anthony said,” I said.
“Well, he may have had an eye for her, you know. She was capable of that effect.” Archie drew on the cheroot, crossing his legs. Julia was pulling on her cotton gardening gloves. It was her flower garden and I could smell it, sweet, airy, like Julia.
The Cavanaugh Quest Page 5
